As of tomorrow, I am San Diego bound! I have never been to California, so when it came time for my husband’s GCSAAconference this year I knew I would be tagging along. I gave my Dad a year’s notice to prepare himself to take care of the kids for a few nights and deal with school, homework, sports practice, etc. I didn’t really care who kept them, I was going no matter what!

I have no idea what to expect, but thanks to Stitch Fix and my amazing stylist I have a new wardrobe to take with me so I am covered to matter the weather! I started a Pinterest board just for San Diego ideas a few months ago and I am looking forward to visiting some of the places I have pinned. I know we will be doing a whale watching tour and visiting the San Diego Zoo, but other than that I am not sure what else we will have time for. We have a meet & greet for the conference at The Knotty Barrel one night and a beach party hosted by a vendor another night. We are staying in the Gaslamp Quarter and so much is within walking distance, so I am really looking forward to that. I don’t have a list of places I really want to go, so I am going to enjoying just “going with the flow” and not having to stick to a plan.

If you have any suggestions for where to go, what to eat, and sights we must see, please leave them in the comments! I’ll take all the travel advice I can get.

Every night we took advantage of the monorail or short walking path from our hotel to Magic Kingdom and went back to the park after resting a bit. I loved having this advantage! This made both our hotel choice and park hopper tickets 100% worth it. We were able to visit one park in the morning, come back to rest, then head to MK at night. Even without FastPasses, we are able to ride almost everything we wanted to during our trip. The boys did great staying up late and being completely off schedule!

Our last night at MK we had a reservation at Be Our Guest. It was the hardest ADR to get and I had to book it way later than I would have liked. We usually eat around 5-5:30 and C goes to bed around 7. Our ADR wasn’t until 7:30 and they were behind by about 30 minutes. There were people trying to do walk-up seating and there wasn’t even an option to just wait, they were 100% booked. Beauty and The Beast is one of my all time favorite Disney movies, so this was one place I was really looking forward to eating at.

The inside was GORGEOUS! It is divided into different rooms you can eat in. We ate in The Castle Gallery which is a replica of Belle’s library at the castle and has life-sized figures of Belle & Beast dancing in the center. The main dining room is The Grand Ballroom and has snow falling behind the windows, then there is the mysterious West Wing which was so beyond cool. It was dark with lots of black draped everywhere and the enchanted rose in the back. After dinner your exit is through the Beast’s study where you can stop and take a photo with him.

Aside from the gorgeous decor and wonderful food, I was most excited to “try the grey stuff” and I have to say, it really was delicious!

Of all the restaurants we ate at during our vacation, Be Our Guest was my favorite. The decor, the character, the menu… Everything was worth the late ADR. I would have been so sad to have missed this opportunity!

On Saturday we visited Animal Kingdom. We started the day off at the Tusker House character buffet breakfast which had Mickey, Donald, Daisy, and Goofy dressed in safari clothes. I will have to say that so far, the characters had come around to our table super fast and we had been in and out of breakfasts in about an hour. I had several people telling me it took at least 2 hours to see the characters and finish with meals so they were a waste of time. I didn’t find this to be the case at all, but we also had our reservations at 8am and the characters were just starting their routes. Maybe if you go later you might have just missed them and have to wait on them to go all the way back around.

Cohen always seems to look less than enthusiastic in the character photos, but I swear he was excited about seeing them all! Maybe he was a little apprehensive and reserved and it just comes through as unenthusiastic in the photos.

We had FastPasses for Kilimanjaro Safari, Festival of The Lion King, a character meet & greet for Cohen, and Expedition Everest for Kyle and Kaden. We waited stand-by for DINOSAUR, and Triceratop Spin. Both kids were scared during DINOSAUR and wouldn’t ride it again, but both enjoyed the safari a lot! We ended up leaving rather late and skipped lunch completely. We had a dinner reservation that night at 5:30 so we didn’t want to mess with our appetite and opted for a quick snack back at the hotel instead.

The views on the Kilimanjaro Safari ride were amazing. The animals were out and about and the grasslands were just so pretty! The truck moves a little too fast for good photos and hardly ever stops, but I did manage to take a few pictures that weren’t blurry.

Overall, we enjoyed Animal Kingdom. It was a lot of walking back and forth from Asia to Africa and DinoLand, but it was worth it. It was our busiest FitBit day with over 20,000 steps and 8 miles!

Sunday we went to Epcot. Originally, I had planned on skipping Epcot as I think it is the least kid friendly park. I decided to go for just a few hours anyway, and that was really a mistake. Everyone was bored and whined and would have much rather been somewhere else. Oh well, lesson learned. I had FastPasses for a character meet with Cohen, MissionSpace for Kyle & Kaden, then Soarin & The Seas with Nemo and Friends. We waited stand-by for Turtle Talk With Crush and Living With the Land. Soarin was BY FAR the best thing at Epcot; all four of us really enjoyed it. We could never get a FP for the Test Track or I think it would have ranked pretty high up there since both kids were big enough to ride it. We ate lunch at Coral Reef which was pretty good and we both liked that they served alcohol after a rough, boring morning. We didn’t even bother going to visit all the countries since the food & wine festival was going on and there seemed to be a ton of people over that way. Needless to say, Epcot was not the kids favorite park and we would probably skip it next time and spend another full day at Magic Kingdom instead. For those of you with kids who went to Epcot, what did they enjoy? I’d love some advice on how to make that park more enjoyable in the future!

Our Disney vacation has come to an end and while I am glad to be home, I miss the magical world already. I am a huge Disney fan and just being there for 5 days was not enough! Partly because we took a break every day for a few hours at the hotel, I just feel like we didn’t have enough time. But also because the lines were super long (120+ minutes) for the popular rides and the FastPasses were all taken. Who wants to wait in line for 2 hours or more with 2 kids?!?! Not this girl! Especially when you can’t take strollers into the queue and the younger kids want to be held the entire time.

We stayed at the Contemporary Resort, which is where I have stayed twice previously when taken as a child/teenager. I love it there. The monorail drives straight through it, Chef Mickey’s character buffet is inside, and it’s a 10 minute walk to Magic Kingdom. Super convenient for us since we went back to MK every night after our afternoon break.

As soon as you walk to the front gate before even going in you can see fall decorations EVERYWHERE! It’s gorgeous! Once you get inside, it doesn’t stop. Every building, light post, column, etc. has decorations. Decorations are all around you and it is so amazing!

Friday we spent the entire day at MK. We had breakfast at Crystal Palace and met the Pooh characters, then went straight to the Seven Dwarves Mine Train since our reservation time was before the park opened and we could never get a FP for that ride. By the time we got there the park had opened and a good many people beat us to the line, but we only waited about 30 minutes. If we had not done that we wouldn’t have ridden that ride because I never saw the wait time under 60 minutes! We were able to use our 3 FastPasses and were still able to wait stand-by for some of the other rides with lines in the 10-20 minute range.

That night we went to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party where you can’t book FastPasses. So we had to wait in line if we wanted to ride anything. We ended up only riding the Astro Blaster and Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin and we waited in line 30 minutes for each of them. My kids wanted to trick-or-treat through MK, so we did 3 or 4 trick-or-treat stations, then we had to meet at the flag pole to have our reserved seating for the Boo To You Halloween Parade we booked through our Hallowishes Dessert Party. After the parade they escorted us to the private dessert party at Tomorrowland Terrace where we had an all you can eat dessert buffet and prime viewing for the Hallowishes fireworks show. The one and ONLY thing my youngest asked for was to meet Jack Skellington. Jack & Sally only come out for the MNSSHP nights, so it was our only chance. The first time we checked, their line was 90 minutes long and we had to meet for the parade. I hoped Cohen would forget but it was all he talked about through the parade and dessert party, so we went back and ended up waiting in line close to an hour. They were very interactive with us, played with his Jack doll, and are the ONLY characters who talked. The look on his face was completely worth it!

I highly, highly recommend the Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. It was so much fun, my kids had a blast, and the costumes, decorations, etc. are so worth seeing. They bring out snacks and merchandise around 6pm that you can only get on party nights as well. The Boo To You Halloween Parade was by far the best parade I’ve seen and I even stopped to watch part of the second one on our way out. My only advice would be to choose a party date during the week if possible and the earlier in October, the better. We went on Friday night and with it being Columbus Day weekend the party was sold out and SUPER crowded. I have been reading a lot of blogs about how the party night is a good time to be in the park with less crowds and shorter lines. That was NOT true for us and I even feel like there were more people there for MNSSHP than there were earlier in the day and the other nights we went.

*All images without my own personal watermark belong to Disney and are free for my personal use for purchasing the Memory Marker. Please do not copy, share, distribute, or reproduce in any way*

Today is the day I have been waiting on for MONTHS! We are headed to DISNEY WORLD. I am so beyond excited! I have been packing for days and gathering things up for even longer than that. Now I can sit back and relax and enjoy the trip! I cannot wait to see how excited my boys are when we finally arrive.

I have a folder in our park backpack filled with all the printables I made for the trip. They are going to be a huge help in keeping up with where we are supposed to be and when, our dining reservations, fast pass reservations, etc. I have a big folder full available for you to download and use as well! If you are going to Disney Land and want to use them, leave me a message in the comments and I can get World changed to Land on all the documents and upload them for you.

Feel free to download and use for yourself, just don’t try to pass them off as your own or sell them in any way. If you would like to share with a friend, please link them to my blog. For all my other Disney planning posts, including items we bought to take with us, please click HERE.

Girls weekend is over and while we were all a little bit sad to leave, we were ready to get home and see our boys! We had an AMAZING weekend and I can definitely see myself going back to Fairhope again in the future.

We started the trip off with an afternoon at the hotel spa – massages, champagne, exfoliation, jacuzzi time, etc. It was wonderful! I get a massage regularly, but clearly I have been missing out by not going to an actual SPA. I would love to go back to Fairhope with my hubby and let him play golf for the day and I can just hang out in the spa ALL day. That would be fantastic!

The hotel grounds are gorgeous and we really enjoyed just wandering around and seeing everything.

We spent all day Saturday shopping in downtown Fairhope and found a lot of cute little shops to go into. We had lunch at Panini Pete’s which was SO good, then drove around looking at the sights.

We ended the night with supper at The Fairhope Inn, a trip to Publix to buy some wine, and sitting on the beach at our hotel just hanging out and listening to music. It was amazing. We hit up Two Sisters Bakery & Deli for brunch on the way home and headed out! It was such a nice weekend getaway and I really enjoyed myself. I can’t wait to start planning next year’s girls trip!

Last year a few of us girls decided we need to start going somewhere once a year after school starts. Guys always get breaks throughout the year, whether they be overnight trips or just a guys night out, so it’s our turn! Before last year, I had never been on a girls trip so it was LONG overdue. My sister-in-law, her sister, and I went to Orange Beach, AL and enjoyed a kid free weekend just relaxing on the beach and shopping.

It’s hard to please everyone when choosing a destination, but I am happy to just go ANYWHERE. This year we are going somewhere 2/3 of us have never been ~ Fairhope, AL. It’s only a little over 2 hours away and sits on the Mobile Bay. I have been seeing pictures all over Pinterest and I cannot wait! It seems like such a picturesque little town and I can imagine just wandering around without a care in the world. 48 hours to go!